The invention takes as its point of departure German Patent Disclosure DE 195 45 439, which was not published prior to the filing date of the present application, and which describes a rack-and-pinion assisted steering system in which overdetermination of the bearing of the rack in the steering housing is avoided without complicated tightening of the tolerances in the manufacture of the steering housing and the rack. The production is simplified by providing that the connection housing between the pinion housing and the cylinder housing is of an elastic material. By means of the elastic connection housing, which itself does not transmit any forces or moments, an overdetermination of the bearing of the rack in the steering housing can be avoided. The location of the pinion housing relative to the cylinder housing is defined by the rack.
In rack-and-pinion assisted steering systems with a relatively rigid connection between the pinion housing and the cylinder housing, production errors between the pinion axis and the rack axis worsens the rolling performance. On the one hand, the teeth of the pinion and rack determine the axes and on the other, the bearing points of the rack and the pinion determine two further axes. So that these axes will match, the components in question must be machined very precisely. The dimensional tolerances and the shape and position tolerances are correspondingly narrow, which means high production costs. In the design in DE 195 45 439, the bearing points of the rack and the pinion are not rigidly fixed in a housing. The alignment of the pinion axis A is effected via the existing contact line B of the teeth. The rack teeth are pressed by the pressure piece into the pinion teeth, thereby aligning the pinion axis. Because of the existing pressure piece play, however, the pinion axis can still shift slightly relative to the rack teeth. This again leads to poor rolling performance of the teeth.